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I’ve been levelling a druid in WoW as a pacifist–basically, I don’t kill anything. (Well, except fish.) This involves a lot of sneaking, and a lot of corpse-running, and doing maybe 10% of the possible quests because there are really very few quests that don’t involve killing anything–and a bunch of those are part of chains that start with killing something, so no go there.

Pacifist levelling used to have a cap somewhere in the high 20s, because that was all the XP you could get from non-lethal questing and the token amount from exploration. These days, you can in theory go all the way to 85 on XP from gathering and, if you have Cataclysm, archaeology. Gathering from a level-appropriate node gives XP of about 1% of a level; digging up an artifact gives maybe half again as much. And since extra herb and metal nodes were introduced, it’s rarely more than a minute or so between gathers.

It’s vastly slower, though. Took me 3 and a half hours to get to level 5 as a pacifist; for a normal character it’s, what, 15 minutes? I think the slowdown is getting less as I advance in level, but it’s never going to go away completely. The upside is that two gathering professions means the character is really, really rich.

It’s kind of a neat experiment. I don’t know if I’m going to remain interested all the way to 85–I haven’t gotten that far with any other character besides Altariel anyway–but for now it’s entertaining.

I am desperately in love with archaeology. Most of my playing time since Cataclysm hit has been spent flying places and digging things up. I haven’t gotten anything “useful” yet–no mounts, weapons, or pets–but I’m having a whole lot of fun with it.

To heck with Loremaster. I can work on quests once my skill is maxed out.

The patch yesterday broke WoW on my computer. I’ve done about a quarter of the suggested fixes, and none have worked yet; I would have done more, but I needed to, you know, sleep. So this evening I’m going to have to try again. I’d ask Liam to go after it, but he’s in the middle of his own update fun and I think it’d be a bad idea, especially since his bad patch is actually on the OS of his computer rather than just a game…

Last night my ICC 10 team succeeded in taking down Sindragosa. Finally. After about 6 months of trying.

Per tradition, I died early in the 3rd phase of the fight (though I lasted longer than usual due to being in an ice block for the first iteration of her “pull everyone in and AoE” attack). I clicked on her and watched her hit points go down…and suddenly I realized she was under 1.5 million, and no one else had died. And it kept going. And she got under a million. And then, that was it.

We all cheered. Someone rezzed me. We took a group shot around her head. I got [Rimetooth Pendant] out of the deal (sorry Bleu!), which is pretty much the best hunter neck piece.

This means all we have to do is kill the Blood Queen, by all accounts an easier fight than Sindragosa, and then we can start chewing glass on Arthas.

I have never played a paladin before in WoW, and now a friend and I are leveling pallys together. The idea is that when we get to a level for it, we’ll start doing randoms as a tank/healer pair, thus guaranteeing queue times of approximately as long as it takes the “Find Group” button’s message to reach the server.

We’re at 5th level now, which means we’ve still got like three powers apiece, but it should be entertaining when we start getting talents and whatnot; I’ve got a good idea of what talents are good for a healer-pally, and my buddy’s played a human paladin so often he says he could do the Deadmines* in his sleep. I’ve even done enough research to find out what stats are good.

I am having some of my usual “This character is not a hunter” problems, starting with “Where are my minimap dots? Why can’t I see where the mobs are?!” And hunters are all about ranged attacks, while paladins have, essentially, no ranged attacks, so that’s going to be interesting to get used to. At least I don’t have to do my own tanking, though.

* The first Alliance dungeon, and pretty much every quest leading up to it is in human territory.

Monday night, I’m out getting my ship from where it was to where I needed it to be in order to memorize a particular chart. I have hired jobbers and am about 3/4 of the way through the moving of the ship when one of the jobbers, out of the blue, sends me a private message: “plank me now”. (Plank: to remove a hired hand from one’s ship by “forcing him to walk the plank”. In fact it deposits the character on the island the ship most recently docked at.) I send back saying “Er, why?” and get no response, so I don’t think about it till a few minutes later when this same person says out loud, so the whole ship can hear, “plank me!” And I say, out loud, “If you need to leave, just disembark; thanks for coming out.” Since there are two ways the char can get off the ship by himself, and I’m in the middle of navigating, this seems reasonable to me. Also this guy hasn’t been working, so I’m not inclined to do him any favors. “plank me poo head!” I say, “Yes, because insults are going to get me to do what you want. If you need to leave, just disembark.”

He replies, “what mean dis ebark poo head”

Blink. OK, at this point I admit I got a little peeved; my reply was “Dis-em-bark. Hit the button that says–wait for it–‘disembark’.” He says “plank me or i will kill u”. I said, “Riiiight. You’re welcome to try.” I should point out that combat in Puzzle Pirates, PvP or otherwise, is not lethal. “i cant get where im going from here” he says, and I say, “Yep, that’s how the game works.” There is a pause of several seconds.

“go to the idland”. I assume he means ‘island’ and reply “What in God’s name do you think we’re doing?” “well make the ship go faster” Uh-huh. “If you want the ship to go faster, you might consider, say, sailing.” He sends me another private message saying “plank me poo head”. I say out loud that insults aren’t any more clever in private messages than out loud.

Around this time, we get to the league point near an island. Since this island is not my destination–and also my idiot jobber has annoyed me–I don’t put into port; we just keep going. We have reached the next league point before he messages me “why didnt you stop?” I reply, “Oh, I must have forgotten. Silly me.” He says, “ok thats it” and challenges me to a swordfight. I decline, as I am now in the part of the ocean I want to memorize and don’t have time to fight with him. He starts calling me poo head again. I ignore him until, finally, he gets off the ship.

OK, fine. Anyone can have a wierdo once in a while.

Later that same evening, someone else comes aboard and has been there all of 30 seconds before demanding “plank me crap head.” I say “I beg your pardon?” She replies, “you heard me booty hole”. I say, “Yes, but I don’t understand why you’re insulting me.” “you all suck” “Well then, why don’t you disembark?” She calls me a few more names and then leaves.

And then, about 15 minutes later, this same person shows up back on board. I ask, “I thought you wanted to be off this awful ship,” and she leaves again.

Note to self: Lynx is handy for foraging, though of course this means that limes and passion fruit are cheap on Eta. What I ought to do is get a whole bunch of people together with all their labor and do a big run, then head to another archipelago.

How does one get inter-archipelago charts? Do they have to be won in combat? None of the shipwrights seem to sell them.

It appears to take three runs over a given league-point before it’s memorized. It might be four; I’m not certain. The fact that my navigating is still shaky at best doesn’t help.

Why can’t I put a candlestick on a blotter? That makes no sense.

I wonder when/if they’re going to implement the missing puzzles (weaving, tailoring, ironworking, building…am I missing any?) I mean, having the housing stuff up and running is great, but I’d rather have a new puzzle to play with. What would be really cool is a charting puzzle–you sail into waters you don’t know, either in the direction of a destination you know or just randomly, and if you play a puzzle well enough you make a chart, allowing players to discover new islands. That would be really nifty.